ChatGPT in a writing class

This semester many of us in education are struggling to adapt to a world with ChatGPT and other AI programs (the cover image was created by DALL-E). My default with students is radical transparency so I decided to show them the program and try and work with it rather than against it this semester. This may be a complete failure, but there is upside:

Knowledge work professionals are already using the tool so my students will have some exposure as they enter new professional spaces.

I figured many of them know or would learn about the tool so I wanted to get out in front of it.

I am treating this semester as an experiment in hopes that I will get a better handle on the tool and future students will benefit.

I'll be updating this throughout the semester as things implode and/or develop. I'll mainly be focusing on my senior level course which is our capstone writing class.

Monday was our first-day and along with normal first-day stuff, I showed them ChatGPT. Only one student out of 28 had used the tool and a few more had heard of it. I entered our first quick write prompt for the class into the tool to show them how it works and unsurprisingly it produced a perfectly reasonable answer. I also showed them limitations of the tool by asking it to write 200 words about the history of Chinese immigrants in Yuba City (a community about an hour away). The program conflates Yuba City and the adjacent town of Marysville in it's response which I only know because my mother has a deep interest in local Chinese history and pointed it out. This conflation of people and places based on textual patterns is a current limitation of the program.

The students were stunned. I set up some recommendations for use in my class, mainly that I want them to tell me if they use it to respond to prompts and made it clear the rules for my class won't be shared in other classes. Finally I explained that turning in work as your own that you did not produce was still plagiarism. This ground is murkier all the time and I don't have great answers.

They turn in their first quick writes next week and I'll update then about whether students used the program and what the responses are like.